Iffy beliefs: Conditional thinking and belief change

The ability to entertain possibilities and draw inferences about them is essential to human intelligence. We examine the hypothesis that conditional if-then statements trigger a mental simulation process in which people suppose the antecedent (if statement) to be true and evaluate the consequent (then statement) in that context. On the assumption that supposing an event to be true increases belief that the event has occurred or will occur, this hypothesis is consistent with the claim that evaluating a conditional will heighten belief in its antecedent more than in its consequent. Two experiments, employing conditionals of the form If animal A has property X, then animal B will have property X, in which X was a property that people could not readily relate to the animals, supported this claim. The effect was stronger following the evaluation of conditionals with dissimilar animal categories.     

Numerical reproduction in pigeons

Pigeons were trained to match the number of responses made during a production phase to the number of keylight flashes (2, 4, or 6) in a previous sample phase. In Experiment 1, there were 2 conditions in which the flashes were programmed to occur at a constant rate or within a constant overall duration. For both conditions, although accuracy was relatively low, responding increased linearly with flash number and coefficients of variation decreased. Positive transfer to novel numbers was obtained only when test and baseline trials had the same temporal organization, but multiple regressions revealed significant control by number independently of temporal cues. In Experiment 2, flashes were programmed to occur pseudorandomly to degrade the validity of temporal cues. Results were similar to in Experiment 1. A prototype response class model accounted for the major features of the data. According to the model, responses during the production phase are shaped into higher order units that are associated with different stimulus numbers and function as a rough category scale of numerosity.     

The Minority-Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland: An Orange Order Perspective

Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with macroexplanations. In this paper the rhetoric of relative group position is analysed in political speeches delivered by leading members of an influential Protestant institution in Northern Ireland. It is apparent that minority and majority claims are not fixed but are flexibly used to achieve local rhetorical goals. Furthermore, the speeches differ before and after the Good Friday Agreement, with a reactionary "hegemonic" Unionist position giving way to a "majority-rights power sharing" argument and a "pseudo-minority" status giving way to a "disempowered minority" argument. These results suggest a view of the Northern Ireland conflict as a struggle for "symbolic power," i.e., the ability to flexibly define the intergroup situation to the ingroup's advantage.     

Child traumatherapy: Its role in managing the effects of trauma,loss, damaged attachment,and dissociation in children exposed to lethal urban community violence

Violence and its effects on children should be a pressing concern for clinicians, policy makers, and public officials. Urban violence assaults the minds and bodies of our children, resulting in troublesome and complex responses that have far-reaching implications for the future of society. This article highlights chronic post-traumatic and loss response patterns associated with the horrors of violence and murder witnessed by a child, and a model of intervention referred to as child traumatherapy.Since the problems presented by many inner city children are wide-ranging, to include attachment problems and dissociation, a multisystems approach transformed in practice into an intersystem approach may be required in many cases. This approach begins with a unisystem, then moves to multisystems, and later to coordinated intersystem service structures. This may be realized through the coordinative skills of the therapist who instrumentally brokers clinical-community services, while ensuring political leveraging for the benefit of children. In essence, the model is a comprehensive one which directly engages the child self system, the family-extended family systems, the community, the political system, while employing ethnoculturally enlightened methods. The model integrates techniques in play, cognitive, behavioral, social, and psychodynamic therapies, and highlights the indispensability of the use of transference to manage terror, horror, and resolve disturbed attachment. These and other issues will be presented in this article.